It takes us way longer than I estimated to skin the snake. All the time we keep one eye on the back of the cave, checking if another big serpent will come out. To hurry things up, I leave the task of deboning the snake to Zan as I go outside and want to finish skinning the wolverrie I’ve started yesterday. It’s frozen now, and I have to work twice as hard. In the end, it’s done. Can not find a way to make a hat off his soft fur, not without a needle and some threat. But we split his hide in half, and one part is enough for Zan to throw over his shoulders. It covers his hands and comes down below his waist. Pretty good. He seems happy with it as he knows it should keep him warm outside in the snow blizzard even as he complains constantly about its strong stench. The snake is completely another matter. It's over twenty feet tall, and there are more than a hundred pounds of lean muscles to carve out. I help him to finish the task. I swear I hear the earth move somewhere over our heads and am thinking if the snake comes, what is the best thing to do, use fire to try and defend ourselves or run through the entrance as fast as I can. Can’t leave Zan behind, but what chance would I have against a beast with only a small blade in my hand? While working on skinning it, we stuck some of its meat on skewers, and it instantly starts to smell way better than wolverrie's. I'm not that hungry, but screw it. Who knows where my next meal will come from? In a few minutes, we can safely bury our teeth in it, and it tastes way better than wolverrie meat. Actually, it tastes better than anything I had shoved down my throat during the last fifteen years. So, we decide to smoke some of that meat as well as wrap a few pounds of it in the skin and shove it inside our backpacks. We figure that should keep us from dying of hunger for at least a few weeks. By the time we are all packed up and ready to leave, the sun comes out outside. The sky is clear and blue, the bluest color I ever remember, and I stop to stare at it for a long time. “What are you doing?” Zan asks, not understanding me at all. “It’s amazing how you can appreciate things… the most common things, even the most banal ones, when they are taken away from you for a long time.” “Well, we better move fast. I think if you want to go back to where we landed, it would take us at least a few hours. And then, we still need to think about shelter and those wolverries.” “Yeah, somehow I don’t think they will be a problem anymore. Still, having a spear or two in our hands won’t hurt a thing.” We throw the snake bones on the entrance, looking for the last time inside, happy to see the last ambers of fire and nothing else, happy I never had to answer my previous dilemma about what to do if a really big serpents came at us. “So, we go back to where we were yesterday?” Zan asks me. “Let’s try. But it won’t be so simple. All our tracks are covered now.” “I think we came from above that ridge,” Zan says and points his fingers to the far right. “Yeah, that’s my guess too. Let’s go there and see how well we can climb that ridge. Going down was rather easy, wasn’t it?” “Not with those beasts on our asses,” Zan says and we finally move away from the cave. It’s hard walking in the deep-knee snow. I go first, make small steps, make it easy for the little guy. But it takes no time for me to feel the burning in my lungs, probably still hurting from the fight with the serpents. I often have to stop and take a break. Everything is quiet and white. No traces anywhere. So peaceful with the wind gone someplace else. The walk gives me a chance to finally just… think. Fresh air and the routine of taking small steps make it effortless, and I start analyzing things. The chip they implanted in me, what they called Personal Intelligence Assistant, had warned me of the oncoming danger. I remember now how it was said that it can process information that I receive even if I’m not fully aware of that information. It can process all the information that reaches my ears, nose, eyes, taste buds. Probably it is capable of picking on sounds I cannot hear or even see further than I think is theoretically possible. But, as I already know, I need to earn those advanced abilities if I want to have them. Makes me think, those abilities are not out of the sphere of possibilities, it’s everything my body is actually capable of doing. But for one reason or not, my body has been limited to using them. And now, PIA can open a swift road for me to acquire them, but only if it perceives that I somehow deserve to have them? They put in some parameters inside the AI unit and I need to figure out what are those. I need to learn how to manipulate it all. It’s all possible. And then, maybe I can open up abilities that might take me years to acquire on my own. It seems awesome. But also scary. Is this world going to be so difficult to survive on that I may actually need all the help that I do not even know I might have, have right there inside my own head? Something else comes to mind. Why was I picked? Was it really because I helped them out? Maybe something else has happened. Need to remember everything I can. Concentrate on every facial expression I saw that Elvish Wannabe have, every word I heard, and everything in between them. But not now. A second ago, I drifted in deep snow, waist-high. Now I need to wrestle out of it, find a better trail. A straight line is not an option. Going over the ground below the trees seems way smarter. “I was wondering when you were going to decide to go through the forested area,” Zan says as we make it to the ground where snow is only ankle deep. “Shut up. If you’re so smart, maybe you can lead,” I say and nudge him in front of myself. “You’re a sensitive dude, aren’t you?” “If you say so, Mr. Smart.” “Huh, Mr. Smart. I like that. Way better than Zan. I mean, Zan, what does that mean, if anything?” “I don’t know. Where I come from, we are given names of our ancestors, those ones that are not with us anymore. It’s a family tradition. I got the name of my grandfather. He was already dead when I was born. My grandmother…” The memory of my family bolts me with pain. It’s a serpent way more fierce than the one I had to fight last night. It’s the one that I have no knife or Zan to defend against. I wonder if I should continue talking. “It was kind of to revive him, huh?” Zan says after I don’t say anything. “Yes. Exactly.” He turns around to look at me. “That’s pretty cool. On account of maybe my family following the same tradition, I guess I’ll keep my name then.” “Sounds right.” “You know…” he says as he makes a few steps. “I know.” “Still don’t know your name.” “I know. But… by now, you know a bit about who I am. Isn’t that better?” “If you say so, chief.” We zig-zag to the bottom of our hill and decide to stop at a frozen stream for a short respite. “You still remember nothing?” I ask Zan. “I remember last night. Scared the shit out of me. And I’m not talking about that Serpent.” That surprises me. “What scared you?” “You,” he says directly, looking me in the eyes. “I’d wake up all the time figuring if I fall asleep, and you may eat me. You looked like … Quite a wolverrie-like back there.” I snort. “Not likely, I may be a murdering son of a bitch, but I ain’t eating human flesh.” “I know that now, but… Back then…” “Back then you were not quite yourself. Something happened to you back then, especially when we killed that serpent.” He looks at me, straight in my eyes. “Do you see... A blue screen too?” he asks me and that makes me twitch. It takes a second for me to recover. “Since when?” I ask. "Since when do you see it?" “Since we killed it.” “Really?” “Yes. It tells me shit. It’s like a Holodeck game or something.” “I know.” “So, you have it for a long time, huh?” “Yes, ever since we got here. And how did you just get it…?” “It said, it got activated because I saved a human life. Meaning…” “Well, if it was not for you… that’s why you stared at the snake’s head, not turning around to check on me. “Yeah, when it first flashed in front of me, I thought it was coming out its head. It kind of blinded me there.” “Now it makes sense. You need to run the Orientation. Maybe that will help.” “How do you do that?” “You say, Access Orientation, Start Orientation,” I say and see the blue screen of my own popping. “Nope,” Zan says. “Say it out loud,” I ask him and he does, but he still shakes his head. “What does your screen tells you?” “It just displays one number that is way different than zero.” “Which one is that?” I ask Zan. “It says, REPUTATION Negative 10,” he says and then instantly bumps me and says, “Don’t fucken’ laugh. But I can’t help myself. “Shit man, and I thought I had it bad with my Karma. Shit, man. What have you done for your Reputation to be that negative?” “I don’t fucken’ remember!” Zan says, and I chuckle even harder. “And I thought I had it bad. Shit, you’re so low you can’t even “At least I got something called Rounds, whatever that is.” “Yeah.” “A thousand of them,” he says. “What? I had to wrestle the serpent, got turned into a bloodied lump of mashed meat almost, and you got ten times the amount I did?” I ask. “Yeah. But I dealt it a deadly blow, didn’t I?” “I guess you did. I guess you did. Should call you a Serpent Wrangler.” “Shit, if you gonna feel so sour about it, I’ll give those rounds to you. For all I know they are useless.” “Nope. Not useless at all. You better keep them. When your reputation goes to 0, you’ll be able to purchase shit with it. I think that’s the minimum you need to be able to buy abilities.” “Abilities?” “How do you think I could see in the dark?” “Shit, that’s pretty cool.” “Yeah. We are inside someone’s idea of a great game, and we’re their little toys to move around on the board. It’s so fucken cool.” “Man, not if you put it down like that.” “Can you check your Health stats?” “No. Nothing. Just Reputation.” It makes me laugh again. I check my Energy. It’s holding around 60 percent. Hydration 80 Percent Fat Deposit 39 Percent “I think we better go,” I say and nudge Zan forward. “And how do I raise my reputation?” “You just keep on saving my life,” I say and I chuckle in silence. Not so funny when I realize I have no idea what Zan had done to deserve the reputation of Negative 10. Way worse than mine. Maybe he is worse than Big Garden and Pick combined. Maybe if he gets his memory back and goes back to his old ways, I’ll wake up with two blades slicing my throat. Not so funny when I think about it better, not funny at all.